I was reading a book on Crimean history recently as it was clearly a very important place in the past and I suspect it may have had some sort of important role in R1b history. The Crimea apparently has had an unbelievable amount of population changes in just the last 2500 years or so ranging from Iranic Cimmerians then similar Scythians and others, then various waves of non-IE steppes horsemen (including Turkic, Mongols etc) and finally Russians. However, what really struck me was even in the last few centuries it has seen almost total population replacement. The Tatars were apparently the main occupants 300 years ago and over time were slowly reduced into a minority by Russian and other settlement until finally Stalin totally removed the Tatar population to other areas of the USSR. There had also been a remanant Gothic kingdom in the Crimea uplands linked to the Byzantine empire which were totally destroyed by the Ottomans when they took Constantinope and mopped up. This was then replaced by a Jewish refugees sect from the middle east (not to be confused with other steppes tribal converts to Judaism) but they slowly evacuated the area before they were largely annhiliated by the Nazis. The Greeks and Italian Venetians also had coastal trade settlements until the point in time, the Greek element stretching back to the Bronze and Iron Ages.

The history is very complex but the reality is that the population of c. 1500AD and even 1700AD was later apparently completely removed. A few Tatars have been allowed to resettle in area in very recent times but not many. So, the upshot is the modern population has almost no connection to that of even 300 years ago and absolutley nothing to do with the population of prehistoric times. This clearly is a very extreme example but I think (unlike western edges of Europe) we simply cannot try and see the remote past in the present populations in places on the main Eurasian historical highways. When people rule out the possibility that R1b was north of the Black Sea etc in prehistoric times then I think they need to bear this in mind.

I dont know how much this picture applies to the Ukraine and south Russia as a whole but I assume large elements of this story also apply beyond the Crimea.

I copied some maps out of a book about Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica (9th century Orthodox missionaries to the Slavs) that might be useful to your deliberations. They show watercourses. One shouldn't post them, I guess, but PM me if you'd like to check them out via email.

Allele comparisons are not at all accurate outside haplogroups being compared and even then we seem to be accustomed to looking for a high percentage of a particular haplogroup where in fact if most of the population was replaced by other groups we should probably be looking for the smaller percentage.

I have always thought that if we could just combine historical sources, linguistics, surname morphology, and physical characteristics along with SNP y-DNA we could come up with a more accurate representation of the history of particular populations.

I think we must really have to look to ancient DNA to resolve things like the position of R1b and R1a before 2600BC. Right now there is no evidence. All we have is the one beaker R1b and one corded ware R1a site at about that time. The other evidence post-dates this. This is true of R1a too. The R1a ancient DNA on the steppes post dates the PIE period by a significant amount of time and as far as I can tell it relates to the chain of cultures that headed west to east through the forrest steppe and then Asia (which may or may not be a reflux movement) that David Anthony links to Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian.

It has never been disputed that R1a lineages were the primary drivers of these saetem groups so its essentially telling us little about the steppes in say 3-4000BC in PIE times. Its also telling us nothing about the spread of the centum group who broke off overwhelmingly to the west before the centum-saetem change. The centum group clearly got themselves clear of this zone prior to this change and they are overwhelmingly associated with R1b more than R1a. A lot could have happened on the northern side of the Black Sea in the 4000-2600BC period. IF the current ideas on variance dating are correct and the ancient Neolithic DNA samples are representative I just do not see it as plausible that the lineages that led to M269 were south of the Black Sea in the earliest farming zone and only got involved late in the Neolithic.

I seriously think it is very very much tea leave reading when people feel certain about where R1b and R1a was in the period prior to 2600BC. There is simply no evidence. While we can accept an R1a link with the saetam group and the chain of cultures Anthony links with them, this chain also only commences c. 2600BC and hugely post-dates the PIE period. More importantly R1a is hopeless when it comes to explaining most of the centum languages. I also note that Antony's chain of cultures that he attributes to spreading the saetem branch are traces back in his own analysis to the Carpathian area c. 2600BC. So, its almost a self fulfilling prophesy that R1a is going to be connected to the cultures later assocaited with the centum groups post-2600BC and the finding of ancient DNA in those cultures is pretty well telling us nothing that we didnt already know.

The question is the state of affairs in the steppes and adjacent c. 3-4000BC not what y DNA was in the Carpathians, the Forrest Steppe and Asia c. 2600BC onwards or associated with language groups that we know anyway are R1a linked. Different time and different place. There is simply as yet know valid modern population or ancient DNA data that tells us what range of yDNA was on the steppes between PIE perhaps c. 4000BC and when the centurm-saetem split had happened (by c. 2600BC?). The very indirect eventual link between R1a and the saetem group and its general west to east movement portrayed by Anthony tends to be overlooked in discussions. If R1a's main thrust was eastwards and is linked to the cultures Anthony suggests are ancestral to the eastern (mainly saetem) languages then of course that means R1a headed back (doubled back/refluxed) into areas closer to the original PIE homeland of the steppe origin model. The fact that R1a is much stronger in the PIE area of the Kurgan model today is essentially explained in Anthony's own model which links the spread of the saetem languages with a west-east spread than begun near the Carpathians. The modern distribution and dominance of R1a and its close correlation with Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian can be explained by that west-east movement outlined by Anthony. However, to say that this means the steppes were R1a dominated prior to that reflux movement is a huge leap. It simply doesnt have to follow at all (unless you want it to).

The Crimea apparently has had an unbelievable amount of population changes in just the last 2500 years...

Thanks for the history lesson. I just wanted to add to the list of upheavals in population genocide, that is often never mentioned: Holdomor.

"The estimates of the death toll by scholars varied greatly. Recent research has narrowed the estimates to between 1.8[7] and 7.5[8] million. According to the decision of Kyiv Appellation Court, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million famine deaths, and as 6.1 million birth deficit.[9]"

The Crimea apparently has had an unbelievable amount of population changes in just the last 2500 years...

Thanks for the history lesson. I just wanted to add to the list of upheavals in population genocide, that is often never mentioned: Holdomor.

"The estimates of the death toll by scholars varied greatly. Recent research has narrowed the estimates to between 1.8[7] and 7.5[8] million. According to the decision of Kyiv Appellation Court, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million famine deaths, and as 6.1 million birth deficit.[9]"

The whole area has a terrible history of displacement etc. However, the reason I highlighted the Crimea and north Black Sea area is its known to have had a near 100% population change in the last 250 years. Its important as this area of southern steppe and north Black Sea shore is one of the areas which people look at today and draw conclusions from modern population studies but this is clearly wrong. Even reading about this westernmost end of the steppes it is clear that absolutely nothing can be inferred from modern populations. It also highlighs a clear case where part of the steppes now very high in R1a almost certainly was hugely lower in this marker given the Mongol descended population of Tatars who occupied the steppes here for centuries until they were squeezed in the status of a minority group by Russian/Ukrainian movements into the area and finally totally removed by Stalin. All this only happened since the reign of Catherine the Great in the late 18th century AD. That is not to say that earlier non-Slavic R1a hadnt been present there before the non-IE nomad waves and I am sure the Scythians and other Iranians were high in R1a. However, they had been replaced by various non-IE Asiatic originated nomadic groups for over1500 years before another (Slavic) R1a group moved in in the 18th century AD.

Its pure guessology. Then again its no better or worse than any other model. The time depths involved in the seperation of these branches is huge and all we see are the tail ends of where these branches went to. It doesnt tell us where they spend many millenia in between. The seperation time of the branches leading to the SNP defined clades are very big indeed and in many cases far older than the SNPs. So there is a huge amount of wandering time that is very hard to put into a prose story. The map is very much a guess IMO. The branches leading to M269 and M73 and V88 split so long ago with such fundemental changes in economy and climate happening since then that it seems almost impossible to reconstruct the locations of their common ancestors. The evidence of this is very old interclades but relatively young intraclades.

My main feeling about R1b in general is it lacks the sort of bushy nature around the time of the early farming period that I would have expected if it was within the early farming area. Also the lack of R1b and R1a in early Neolithic samples to date. It seems to me to have been peripherall to farming until later in the Neolithic at least. On that basis I find placing it in the middle east, Anatolia etc unlikely unless of course it had a very special niche that kept it peripheral for a long time.

Personally I think there is too much of an attempt to make R1a and R1b contrast when they actually seem to share many characteristics such as unimpressive branching until late in the Neolithic, a lack of Neolithic ancient DNA and a major take-off late in the Neolithic. I suspect they actually were in a similar area and we are reading way too much into modern distributions caused by movements after 3000BC. They clearly took different paths but that does not mean they had radically different origins. Anthony pretty well outlines a model which involves most of the R1a associated cultures and language groups as having orignated in a string of cultures that had a kind of reflux movement back east from the Carpathian area through the forest steppe and eventually into Asia. This is all post-2700BC. It fits rather neatly and I think he is probably right on this.

However, this does not tell us anything about what was going on in the actual European steppe before this in terms of R1a-R1b relations and distribution. In fact you could say that Anthony's model for the R1a-cultures-languages group relating to Slavic, Baltic and I-Iranian works so well that it strengthens the idea that R1b is probably also linked to an (apparently earlier split) of the western IE peoples and there is a real genetic link.

It suggests to me that R1b probably headed west at some point between 5000-3000BC with the bulk of the centum group. The problem with finding a solution at the later end of this scale is simply it requires models that are very contrasting in their complexity and lack of self evident natutr than the R1a centum cultural model that Anthony presents.

I think Anthony is correct in his model of the eastward spread of the Saetem group through the forest steppe and ultimately to Asia but why then is the apparently equally convincing R1b-western IE model so hazy. The basic contrast is that R1a and the saetem group is presented as a folk movement while the apparently R1b related centum group (beyond the east of Europe) has always been a house of cards model that doesnt feel like a folk movement at all. I wonder if the way of resolving this could be that R1b and indeed the centum branch actually existed pre-4000BC in at least the easternmost part of the farming world and the attempt to link it to steppe cultures of later times is actually wrong.

Perhaps it dispersed west from somewhere in SE Europe around the Carpathians in the period 5000-4000BC prior to the major steppe horizons. Huge cultures like TRB (c. 4000-3000BC) for example could easily have been in a position to transfer words for inventions like the wheel across chunks of Europe and the time gap (centuries rather than millenia) and geography gap between the spread of this culture and the invention of the wheel was not so great IMO that a borrowing like that would be obvious from lingusitics. Clearly the original Renfrew model of the very earliest farmers being IE does not seem to work but I am not so sure that the mid-late Neolithic cultures like TRB etc can be ruled out as IE speaking on the basis of vocab.

The simplest solution to me would be that the R1a eastward spread associated with the eastern IE languages is indeed a copper age one of c. 2700BC onwards but that the western IE languages split off and spread west before this and were not assocaited with steppe cultures. Trying to squeeze steppe solutions into western IE languages always looks tenious IMO. Of course this does all lead back to the question of what the ultimate common denomenator of both groups (Proto-IE) was if it was not steppes nomads. I still feel there is a strong possibility that PIE was related to non-steppe (but close to the western edge of the steppes) groups that had been brought into farming well before the Yamnaya horizon.

I personally think the whole Bug-Dniester/Cuc-Type transition has something to do with R1b being brought into the farming zone with the Bug-Dniester group being the element most likely to have had R1b. Essentially they could be Bug-Dniester people gentically but who were transformed into a farming culture and spread west as a farming culture (with steppe influences) when the climatic decline that ruined C-Tryp and drove steppe elements west happened. Of course I realise that this moves the PIE world slightly west to the western edge of the steppes but I have never found the Uralic contact evidence anywhere near as clinching on a more easterly PIE homeland than it is often presented as - there are far too many unknowns.

So returning to the map, I dont believe R1a and R1b were in hugely contrasting locations in say 4000BC. Perhaps R1b was among the Bug Dniester people who were absorbed into farming by the Cuc-Tryp group while R1a was east-adjacent. I dont buy the whole idea that R1b was in the early farming zone of Anatolia and the middle east until much before 4000BC. It is important to remember that there is no such thing as an archiac branch, just the modern tail end of different branches of equal ultimate age. Also, remember that the area north of the Black Sea has had incredibly population change in even the last few centuries and many different groups dominated this area in the last 3000 years, not to mention the late Slavic expansions etc. So, this crucial area is essentially of no use in using modern populations as proxys for 5000 years ago.